Despite having come across a fair amount of the material before and it being perhaps a little too long, I really enjoyed reading Philip Ball’s book “Critical Mass – How One Thing Leads to Another”. This book ranges through a wide variety of topics, including economics, the spread of culture, social behaviour and traffic looking at how methods that are better known within traditional fields of physics are bringing new insights when deployed to explore these areas. The book has a strong basis in outlining the history of the development of statistical physics, phase transitions etc. which I found fascinating and made me wish that I was able to study physics now (with the benefit of experience) rather than over 25 years ago (when I knew almost nothing). It also covers a lot of interesting models that use individual agent-based models to capture the behaviour of the multiple interacting agents that make up many social systems (such as financial markets, traffic flows etc.) – just the kind of thing that I wish I could do…
Philip Ball is one of those writers who, when I read his work, I can sense a great command of English and a clarity of expression that makes the material flow off the page. As a bonus, one of the best things about discovering this book was the accompanying discovery that Ball has written quite a few more or topics that also interest me (Water, Patterns, Music) so I can tell that I’ll be working my way through his output over time.
Tim O'Hare 